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Prepared or Paranoid? The Vigilant Mindset

Talyn

Talyn

SAINT
Founding Member
If you happen to care deeply about your own personal security and that of your family, there are a few tips that will help keep you prepared without being paranoid. These steps, a part of a well-rounded suite of soft skills, will help give you the upper hand should anything happen, while also placing your mind at ease.

The Vigilant Mindset

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The main thing, in my opinion, is avoiding the known trouble spots/bad areas. Next is being constantly aware of your surroundings. I very rarely am looking at my phone or texting. I am more old school....I look at my "smart phone" as being a phone that has texting capability. I do play games on it when I am at home or on break at work. I have a computer that I custom built for serious gaming, and a gaming capable laptop that I am currently typing this on. Filling up the vehicles at a gas station, head on a swivel. Casually, of course. Walking in and out of stores, always looking around in a calm manner.
 
Not so much as paranoid as I am situationally aware, we discuss often about staying away from certain areas that are more prone to crime however I see those criminals branching out to areas that haven’t seen them and are catching people off guard. You hear it all the time,
“this is a nice neighborhood”
The problem is those
“nice neighborhoods” are now becoming a new playground for criminals.
You can’t/shouldn’t be paranoid but you can be vigilant and observant.
 
I’m not paranoid (or at least I don’t think so!!), but I attempt to be prepared. I think being prepared is kind of a subjective term. Each of us (neglecting the effects of aging) can interpret being prepared differently. If physically able, we could exercise and train so that we could approach (maybe at a distance!) a Navy Seal or Army Ranger, who in my thinking are the pinnacle of being prepared. But for most of us, yours truly included for sure, that goal is unreachable. So how can being prepared really be defined? Is there a “test” like in shooting competitions (i.e. put a certain number of rounds in a defined target area)? Do we need to be masters of Krav Maga or similar? Go to the shooting range monthly, weekly or daily? Be retired from law enforcement or the military?

Being prepared is really an illusive and moving target! Situational awareness is likely the main key, but there are others.

Sorry for the long post, but these things run through my mind all the time. So far, I haven’t found THE answer.
 
Bassbob said:
Good article T-man. I don't think I am paranoid, but I am constantly thinking.
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Considering the way things are going with increased crime (even in the lower population parts of the country), the flood of illegals; the majority indebted to the drug cartels in order to pay off smuggling fees, the massive flood of drugs coming in based on cartel & CCP activities, the mindset of screwing up our energy system, the prevalence of radical groups in the country, and the fiscal and managerial incompetence of federal and several state/big city govts; it's prudent for a vigilant mindset to be prepared for multiple scenarios.

As Benjamin Franklin once said... “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”
 
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TL/DR: I don't believe Situational Awareness can be taught, only learned by experience.


I've said this before and I will say it again you cannot teach somebody situational awareness. You cannot decide to increase or decrease your level of situational awareness. You can decide whether a given action (such as varying your route home) is prudent or unnecessary but I don't believe that you can make a conscious decision to be more or less situationally aware in any given situation, at least not for any extended period of time.

I've made this analogy before and I'm absolutely convinced it's correct, situational awareness is like a radar detector. The majority of the time your radar detector is sitting on your dashboard doing its thing and you're paying it no attention, until it picks up signal and it beeps.

The majority of the time your "situational awareness" is sitting on your brain's dashboard doing its thing and you're not paying any attention to it until it picks up a signal and it beeps.

From 2002 on I have worked nights almost exclusively. I worked in a factory for three years before I became a security guard. I would come home at approximately 2A.M. every night. I was always surprised by the number of people wandering through my neighborhood at that hour.

As a security guard I worked downtown in a parking garage right next to the street where all the nightclubs were (South Tejon) on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights it seemed like every night right around 10 O'Clock the trouble would start. You could almost set your clock by it.

I worked as a roving guard for a total of about five years of my "career". I am not trying to equate what I did to what the police did but I got to see some of the things the cops see and I got to deal with some of the same people.

I was always surprised by how many people wander around this town all night. I'd see someone on the South end one night and the same person on the Northeast side a couple of days later. It's been my observation that truly homeless people hide out and sleep during the day (warmer and safer) and conduct their business at night. I've also noticed that they move around frequently because they don't want to be easy for the cops to find.

Last thing, my last year of work coincided with the lock downs. I was calling the police to report petty crimes and being told that a cop MIGHT show up later IF one became available.

I called on one guy(tresspasser) a half a dozen times before I actually got a cop to respond, and when she did. she pulled up next to my company truck and handed me her business card with the Incident Number already on it and flat told me she wasn't going to engage the guy unless she absolutely had to. It turned out that the presence of a police car was enough to run him off and I never saw him again.

throughout all of this there were several times when I would stop at Walmart on my way home and see someone in the store who I had previously called the cops on. I had a friend who had previously worked as a Corrections Officer who said she routinely encountered former inmates in public.
So, I said all that to say that those experiences were enough to teach me that the world isn't a safe place and that the Police aren't coming to save you and I've tried to act accordingly.
 
Situational awareness was sort of a liability back when I first was discharged. Years ago. People thought I was paranoid (there's that word again),I would take walks through the forest and was always turning around and walking backwards for a time. It went on for years.Thats just one example. There are many more. These days I feel I have an edge on most of the people around me who are to this day oblivious of what's going on around them.
 
My wife chuckles because she knows that if we're going to sit down in a restaurant, she will allow my seat to have its back to a wall. She chuckles, but I think she deeply understands awareness and preparation and hopefully never gets the occasion to witness its necessity. She doesn't give me any grief with CCW, so I'm pretty sure she gets it. I don't believe Situational Awareness is some ninja skill. It is simply (A) Understanding the need, (B) preparing for as many contingencies as possible, (C) Knowing when to act, and (D) PAYING ATTENTION. And FWIW, my 'preparedness' is not limited to survival/warfare skills. it also includes keeping a blanket and bottle of water in my vehicle, as a simple example. My MIL was riding in the back seat and asked me about it and I told her why it was there. She said "I've never thought of that" (getting stuck in bad weather). My wife said to her: He's always prepared. I've embraced the Boy Scout motto of "Always Prepared'. Also, I"m fond of Better Safe Than Sorry".
 
Talyn said:
Considering the way things are going with increased crime (even in the lower population parts of the country), the flood of illegals; the majority indebted to the drug cartels in order to pay off smuggling fees, the massive flood of drugs coming in based on cartel & CCP activities, the mindset of screwing up our energy system, the prevalence of radical groups in the country, and the fiscal and managerial incompetence of federal and several state/big city govts; it's prudent for a vigilant mindset to be prepared for multiple scenarios.

As Benjamin Franklin once said... “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”
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I think we are all driven by a bit of paranoia. It's probably the reason we all own so many guns.

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I've told this story before but many many years ago I worked in a group home for troubled kids.

One night during dinner I was having a conversation with one of the kids when another kid asked me a question. I turned to answer the other kid and the first one, feeling disrespected, bounced her Melemene dinner plate off my forehead. That was the beginning of my journey of learning situational awareness.

I also worked in a mental health facility for almost a year. That was an environment where one minute a patient was fine and the next he decided that you were the Antichrist and you had to die. That only has to happen a couple of times before you really start paying attention to what's going on around you.

I honestly don't know if you can teach somebody situational awareness any other way than by putting them in a position where they have to pay attention to what's going on around them or they're going to have to suffer actual consequences.
 
Perhaps situational awareness cannot be taught, but it can be learned. Once learned, it becomes a habit. After a personal protection class, I started paying much more attention to my surroundings. Now it's second nature. Action Self Protection discusses "normalcy bias." People tend to assume a situation is benign when it may not be. The guy in a hoodie and Covid mask approaching at a gas pump probably just wants directions to the nearest Sunday school, etc. etc.
 
I agree, Inusuit. If the consequences of not being situationally aware are severe enough, over time one will learn to be more aware or will win the Darwin Award. Some folks are likely more prone to be aware, or it could be that they learned early to pay attention.
 
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